Announcements

9 October 2018

The next generation DAS, DAS-6, will get funding!
For details, see the DAS Achievements page.
DAS-6 is expected to become operational in the second half of 2019.

2 Jan 2017

DAS-5/VU has been extended with 4 TitanX-Pascal GPUs.

May, 2016

IEEE Computer publishes paper about 20 years of Distributed ASCI Supercomputer.
See the DAS Achievements page.

28 Sep 2015

DAS-5/VU has been extended with 16 GTX TitanX GPUs.

DAS-5 User Accounts

Login accounts

If you are a faculty member or student at one of the Computer Science groups
in the ASCI research school, or if you are ASTRON- or NLeSC-employee,
you may request a login account on the DAS-5 system by sending mail to
das-account@cs.vu.nl.
Please include your affiliation, and planned purpose of your account.
In case you are a student, specify the course or project your
account is needed for, and the staff member acting as advisor.

Access credentials

The DAS-5 clusters do not form one seamless whole. In particular, the password
administration is done per site: the master copy of the password files is at
fs0.das5.cs.vu.nl, and users should only change their password
there. The password files at the other sites will be regularly updated with the
version at the master site.

File systems

The file systems at different sites are completely separate, so it
will be necessary to transfer the files between the home directories
manually (e.g., by means of scp), or by using Grid software that does
this transparently for you.

Besides the home directories, the directory /var/scratch of the
file server is also mounted on each DAS-5 node. You can use the subdirectory
/var/scratch/<userid> for temporary bulk storage during or
between jobs. In case you need space for temporary files on each node
separately, you can use /local/<userid>. Please empty
/var/scratch/<userid> and /local/<userid>
when you no longer need the space.

The default file quotum for users in their home directory is 4 GB.
The /home quotum is limited to this amount since we maintain daily
backups for this, and our backup capacity is restricted.
The default file quotum for users in their scratch directory is 40 GB
(i.e., a factor 10 higher than on home); scratch directories are not
backed up however, so only use this for data sets or applications
that can easily be reconstructed if needed.

System administrators

Problem reports, e.g., missing software or documentation or apparent hardware
failures, should be sent to das-sysadm@cs.vu.nl.

For account related support (e.g., if you ran out of diskquota or you forgot your password)
please send mail to das-account@cs.vu.nl.

Access

Access to the DAS-5 is possible by logging in to the DAS-5 fileserver at one of
the participating sites using ssh (secure shell).
To log in to DAS-5 when you are not on-site, first login to a compute server,
workstation or access server at your site using your site's account
(which may be named different from your DAS-5 account).

At VU Amsterdam, external access is provided via ssh.data.vu.nl using your VUnetid.
At the VU on-site, get direct access from a registered network, or access DAS-5
via the compute servers pcoms001.vu.local or pcoms002.vu.local.
For users at LIACS (Leiden University), external access is provided via ssh.liacs.nl.
Users at the University of Amsterdam can use UvA-VPN to connect to DAS-5.

The DAS-5 head node (fileserver) and compute nodes are named as follows:

Cluster

Head node

Compute nodes

VU

fs0.das5.cs.vu.nl

node001-node068

LU

fs1.das5.liacs.nl

node101-node124

UvA

fs2.das5.science.uva.nl

node201-node218

TUD

fs3.das5.tudelft.nl

node301-node348

UvA-MN

fs4.das5.science.uva.nl

node401-node431

ASTRON

fs5.das5.astron.nl

node501-node509

Users will typically login to one of the DAS-5 file servers, develop software there,
and start the parallel applications on a subset of the compute nodes. To avoid people
getting in each other's way on the compute nodes, every DAS-5 user is required to use
the cluster startup and reservation commands described in this
section.